Post-World War II trial of German doctors for war crimes
The Doctors' Trial (officially United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.) was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of high-ranking German officials and industrialists that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. These trials were held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The trials are collectively known as the "subsequent Nuremberg trials", formally the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).[1]
Twenty of the 23 defendants were medical doctors and were accused of having been involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. The indictment was filed on 25 October 1946; the trial lasted from 9 December that year until 20 August 1947. Of the 23 defendants, seven were acquitted and seven received death sentences; the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.
"The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals."
War crimes: performing medical experiments, without the subjects' consent, on prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, in the course of which experiments the defendants committed murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts. Also planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed, and so on, by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums during the Euthanasia Program and participating in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates.
Crimes against humanity: committing crimes described under count 2 also on German nationals.
Membership in a criminal organization, the SS.[3]
The tribunal largely dropped count 1, stating that the charge was beyond its jurisdiction.
For some, the difference between receiving a prison term and the death sentence was membership in the SS, "an organization declared criminal by the judgement of the International Military Tribunal". However, some SS medical personnel received prison sentences. The degree of personal involvement and/or presiding over groups involved was a factor in others.[citation needed]
^"The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
^"The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2023-10-10.
^"The Doctors Trial". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2007-10-11. Retrieved 2007-10-11. – Excerpts from the official trial record, opening and closing statements, and eyewitness testimony.
^Ruff, Siegfried, et al. Sicherheit und Rettung in der Luftfahrt. Koblenz : Bernard & Graefe, c1989.
Further reading
Hanauske-Abel, H. (1996). "Not a slippery slope or sudden subversion: German medicine and National Socialism in 1933". British Medical Journal. 313 (7070): 1453–1463. doi:10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1453. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 2352969. PMID 8973235.(subscription required)
Heller, Kevin Jon (2011). The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-955431-7.
Lifton-Robert, Robert J. (2000) [1st. Pub. 1986 London:Macmillan]. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-04905-9.
Pellegrino, E. (15 August 1997). "The Nazi Doctors and Nuremberg: Some Moral Lessons Revisited". Annals of Internal Medicine. 127 (4): 307–308. CiteSeerX10.1.1.694.9894. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-127-4-199708150-00010. PMID 9265432. S2CID 30547329.(subscription required)
Seidelman, W. (1996). "Nuremberg lamentation: for the forgotten victims of medical science". British Medical Journal. 313 (7070): 1463–1467. doi:10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1463. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 2352986. PMID 8973236.(subscription required)
Spitz, Vivien (2005). Doctors from Hell. Sentient Publications. ISBN 978-1-59181-032-2.
Weindling, P.J. (2005). Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-3911-1.
External links
Media related to Doctors' Trial at Wikimedia Commons
"Transcripts". The Nuremberg Trials Project. Harvard Law School Library. Archived from the original on 2011-04-15. – Partial transcript from the trial
Cohen, Baruch C. "The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments". Jewish Law.
Biddiss, M (June 1997). "Disease and dictatorship: the case of Hitler's Reich" (pdf). Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 90 (6): 342–346. doi:10.1177/014107689709000616. PMC 1296317. PMID 9227388.